OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Global-Local Image Perceptual Score (GLIPS): Evaluating Photorealistic Quality of AI-Generated Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces the Global-Local Image Perceptual Score (GLIPS), an image metric designed to assess the photorealistic image quality of AI-generated images with a high degree of alignment to human visual perception. Traditional metrics such as FID and KID scores do not align closely with human evaluations. The proposed metric incorporates advanced transformer-based attention mechanisms to assess local similarity and Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to evaluate global distributional similarity. To evaluate the performance of GLIPS, we conducted a human study on photorealistic image quality. Comprehensive tests across various generative models demonstrate that GLIPS consistently outperforms existing metrics like FID, SSIM, and MS-SSIM in terms of correlation with human scores. Additionally, we introduce the Interpolative Binning Scale (IBS), a refined scaling method that enhances the interpretability of metric scores by aligning them more closely with human evaluative standards. The proposed metric and scaling approach not only provides more reliable assessments of AI-generated images but also suggest pathways for future enhancements in image generation technologies.
Kuramoto Oscillators and Swarms on Manifolds for Geometry Informed Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We propose the idea of using Kuramoto models (including their higher-dimensional generalizations) for machine learning over non-Euclidean data sets. These models are systems of matrix ODE's describing collective motions (swarming dynamics) of abstract particles (generalized oscillators) on spheres, homogeneous spaces and Lie groups. Such models have been extensively studied from the beginning of XXI century both in statistical physics and control theory. They provide a suitable framework for encoding maps between various manifolds and are capable of learning over spherical and hyperbolic geometries. In addition, they can learn coupled actions of transformation groups (such as special orthogonal, unitary and Lorentz groups). Furthermore, we overview families of probability distributions that provide appropriate statistical models for probabilistic modeling and inference in Geometric Deep Learning. We argue in favor of using statistical models which arise in different Kuramoto models in the continuum limit of particles. The most convenient families of probability distributions are those which are invariant with respect to actions of certain symmetry groups.
Gaze-DETR: Using Expert Gaze to Reduce False Positives in Vulvovaginal Candidiasis Screening
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate detection of vulvovaginal candidiasis is critical for women's health, yet its sparse distribution and visually ambiguous characteristics pose significant challenges for accurate identification by pathologists and neural networks alike. Our eye-tracking data reveals that areas garnering sustained attention - yet not marked by experts after deliberation - are often aligned with false positives of neural networks. Leveraging this finding, we introduce Gaze-DETR, a pioneering method that integrates gaze data to enhance neural network precision by diminishing false positives. Gaze-DETR incorporates a universal gaze-guided warm-up protocol applicable across various detection methods and a gaze-guided rectification strategy specifically designed for DETR-based models. Our comprehensive tests confirm that Gaze-DETR surpasses existing leading methods, showcasing remarkable improvements in detection accuracy and generalizability.
Distributed Nonlinear Conic Optimisation with partially separable Structure
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper we consider the problem of distributed nonlinear optimisation of a separable convex cost function over a graph subject to cone constraints. We show how to generalise, using convex analysis, monotone operator theory and fixed-point theory, the primal-dual method of multipliers (PDMM), originally designed for equality constraint optimisation and recently extended to include linear inequality constraints, to accommodate for cone constraints. The resulting algorithm can be used to implement a variety of optimisation problems, including the important class of semidefinite programs with partially separable structure, in a fully distributed fashion. We derive update equations by applying the Peaceman-Rachford splitting algorithm to the monotonic inclusion related to the lifted dual problem. The cone constraints are implemented by a reflection method in the lifted dual domain where auxiliary variables are reflected with respect to the intersection of the polar cone and a subspace relating the dual and lifted dual domain. Convergence results for both synchronous and stochastic update schemes are provided and an application of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated to implement an approximate algorithm for maximum cut problems based on semidefinite programming in a fully distributed fashion.
Artificial Intelligence for the Internal Democracy of Political Parties
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

The article argues that AI can enhance the measurement and implementation of democratic processes within political parties, known as Intra-Party Democracy (IPD). It identifies the limitations of traditional methods for measuring IPD, which often rely on formal parameters, self-reported data, and tools like surveys. Such limitations lead to the collection of partial data, rare updates, and significant demands on resources. To address these issues, the article suggests that specific data management and Machine Learning (ML) techniques, such as natural language processing and sentiment analysis, can improve the measurement (ML about) and practice (ML for) of IPD. The article concludes by considering some of the principal risks of ML for IPD, including concerns over data privacy, the potential for manipulation, and the dangers of overreliance on technology.
Classifying geospatial objects from multiview aerial imagery using semantic meshes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Aerial imagery is increasingly used in Earth science and natural resource management as a complement to labor-intensive ground-based surveys. Aerial systems can collect overlapping images that provide multiple views of each location from different perspectives. However, most prediction approaches (e.g. for tree species classification) use a single, synthesized top-down "orthomosaic" image as input that contains little to no information about the vertical aspects of objects and may include processing artifacts. We propose an alternate approach that generates predictions directly on the raw images and accurately maps these predictions into geospatial coordinates using semantic meshes. This method$\unicode{x2013}$released as a user-friendly open-source toolkit$\unicode{x2013}$enables analysts to use the highest quality data for predictions, capture information about the sides of objects, and leverage multiple viewpoints of each location for added robustness. We demonstrate the value of this approach on a new benchmark dataset of four forest sites in the western U.S. that consists of drone images, photogrammetry results, predicted tree locations, and species classification data derived from manual surveys. We show that our proposed multiview method improves classification accuracy from 53% to 75% relative to an orthomosaic baseline on a challenging cross-site tree species classification task.
Properties that allow or prohibit transferability of adversarial attacks among quantized networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. Further, these adversarial examples are found to be transferable from the source network in which they are crafted to a black-box target network. As the trend of using deep learning on embedded devices grows, it becomes relevant to study the transferability properties of adversarial examples among compressed networks. In this paper, we consider quantization as a network compression technique and evaluate the performance of transfer-based attacks when the source and target networks are quantized at different bitwidths. We explore how algorithm specific properties affect transferability by considering various adversarial example generation algorithms. Furthermore, we examine transferability in a more realistic scenario where the source and target networks may differ in bitwidth and other model-related properties like capacity and architecture. We find that although quantization reduces transferability, certain attack types demonstrate an ability to enhance it. Additionally, the average transferability of adversarial examples among quantized versions of a network can be used to estimate the transferability to quantized target networks with varying capacity and architecture.
HMAR: Hierarchical Masked Attention for Multi-Behaviour Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

In the context of recommendation systems, addressing multi-behavioral user interactions has become vital for understanding the evolving user behavior. Recent models utilize techniques like graph neural networks and attention mechanisms for modeling diverse behaviors, but capturing sequential patterns in historical interactions remains challenging. To tackle this, we introduce Hierarchical Masked Attention for multi-behavior recommendation (HMAR). Specifically, our approach applies masked self-attention to items of the same behavior, followed by self-attention across all behaviors. Additionally, we propose historical behavior indicators to encode the historical frequency of each items behavior in the input sequence. Furthermore, the HMAR model operates in a multi-task setting, allowing it to learn item behaviors and their associated ranking scores concurrently. Extensive experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our code and datasets are available here (https://github.com/Shereen-Elsayed/HMAR).
Eulerian-Lagrangian Fluid Simulation on Particle Flow Maps
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

We propose a novel Particle Flow Map (PFM) method to enable accurate long-range advection for incompressible fluid simulation. The foundation of our method is the observation that a particle trajectory generated in a forward simulation naturally embodies a perfect flow map. Centered on this concept, we have developed an Eulerian-Lagrangian framework comprising four essential components: Lagrangian particles for a natural and precise representation of bidirectional flow maps; a dual-scale map representation to accommodate the mapping of various flow quantities; a particle-to-grid interpolation scheme for accurate quantity transfer from particles to grid nodes; and a hybrid impulse-based solver to enforce incompressibility on the grid. The efficacy of PFM has been demonstrated through various simulation scenarios, highlighting the evolution of complex vortical structures and the details of turbulent flows. Notably, compared to NFM, PFM reduces computing time by up to 49 times and memory consumption by up to 41%, while enhancing vorticity preservation as evidenced in various tests like leapfrog, vortex tube, and turbulent flow.
LoRA Learns Less and Forgets Less
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely-used parameter-efficient finetuning method for large language models. LoRA saves memory by training only low rank perturbations to selected weight matrices. In this work, we compare the performance of LoRA and full finetuning on two target domains, programming and mathematics. We consider both the instruction finetuning (approximately 100K prompt-response pairs) and continued pretraining (20B unstructured tokens) data regimes. Our results show that, in the standard low-rank settings, LoRA substantially underperforms full finetuning. Nevertheless, LoRA better maintains the base model's performance on tasks outside the target domain. We show that LoRA mitigates forgetting more than common regularization techniques such as weight decay and dropout; it also helps maintain more diverse generations. Finally, we show that full finetuning learns perturbations with a rank that is 10-100X greater than typical LoRA configurations, possibly explaining some of the reported gaps. We conclude by proposing best practices for finetuning with LoRA.
STAR: A Benchmark for Situated Reasoning in Real-World Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Reasoning in the real world is not divorced from situations. How to capture the present knowledge from surrounding situations and perform reasoning accordingly is crucial and challenging for machine intelligence. This paper introduces a new benchmark that evaluates the situated reasoning ability via situation abstraction and logic-grounded question answering for real-world videos, called Situated Reasoning in Real-World Videos (STAR Benchmark). This benchmark is built upon the real-world videos associated with human actions or interactions, which are naturally dynamic, compositional, and logical. The dataset includes four types of questions, including interaction, sequence, prediction, and feasibility. We represent the situations in real-world videos by hyper-graphs connecting extracted atomic entities and relations (e.g., actions, persons, objects, and relationships). Besides visual perception, situated reasoning also requires structured situation comprehension and logical reasoning. Questions and answers are procedurally generated. The answering logic of each question is represented by a functional program based on a situation hyper-graph. We compare various existing video reasoning models and find that they all struggle on this challenging situated reasoning task. We further propose a diagnostic neuro-symbolic model that can disentangle visual perception, situation abstraction, language understanding, and functional reasoning to understand the challenges of this benchmark.
Lagrangian Covector Fluid with Free Surface
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces a novel Lagrangian fluid solver based on covector flow maps. We aim to address the challenges of establishing a robust flow-map solver for incompressible fluids under complex boundary conditions. Our key idea is to use particle trajectories to establish precise flow maps and tailor path integrals of physical quantities along these trajectories to reformulate the Poisson problem during the projection step. We devise a decoupling mechanism based on path-integral identities from flow-map theory. This mechanism integrates long-range flow maps for the main fluid body into a short-range projection framework, ensuring a robust treatment of free boundaries. We show that our method can effectively transform a long-range projection problem with integral boundaries into a Poisson problem with standard boundary conditions -- specifically, zero Dirichlet on the free surface and zero Neumann on solid boundaries. This transformation significantly enhances robustness and accuracy, extending the applicability of flow-map methods to complex free-surface problems.
SecureLLM: Using Compositionality to Build Provably Secure Language Models for Private, Sensitive, and Secret Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Traditional security mechanisms isolate resources from users who should not access them. We reflect the compositional nature of such security mechanisms back into the structure of LLMs to build a provably secure LLM; that we term SecureLLM. Other approaches to LLM safety attempt to protect against bad actors or bad outcomes, but can only do so to an extent making them inappropriate for sensitive data. SecureLLM blends access security with fine-tuning methods. Each data silo has associated with it a separate fine-tuning and a user has access only to the collection of fine-tunings that they have permission for. The model must then perform on compositional tasks at the intersection of those data silos with the combination of those individual fine-tunings. While applicable to any task like document QA or making API calls, in this work we concern ourselves with models that learn the layouts of new SQL databases to provide natural-language-to-SQL translation capabilities. Existing fine-tuning composition methods fail in this challenging environment, as they are not well-equipped for handling compositional tasks. Compositionality remains a challenge for LLMs. We contribute both a difficult new compositional natural-language-to-SQL translation task and a new perspective on LLM security that allows models to be deployed to secure environments today.
A Payoff-Based Policy Gradient Method in Stochastic Games with Long-Run Average Payoffs
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the significant potential for various applications, stochastic games with long-run average payoffs have received limited scholarly attention, particularly concerning the development of learning algorithms for them due to the challenges of mathematical analysis. In this paper, we study the stochastic games with long-run average payoffs and present an equivalent formulation for individual payoff gradients by defining advantage functions which will be proved to be bounded. This discovery allows us to demonstrate that the individual payoff gradient function is Lipschitz continuous with respect to the policy profile and that the value function of the games exhibits the gradient dominance property. Leveraging these insights, we devise a payoff-based gradient estimation approach and integrate it with the Regularized Robbins-Monro method from stochastic approximation theory to construct a bandit learning algorithm suited for stochastic games with long-run average payoffs. Additionally, we prove that if all players adopt our algorithm, the policy profile employed will asymptotically converge to a Nash equilibrium with probability one, provided that all Nash equilibria are globally neutrally stable and a globally variationally stable Nash equilibrium exists. This condition represents a wide class of games, including monotone games.
Automating the Training and Deployment of Models in MLOps by Integrating Systems with Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

This article introduces the importance of machine learning in real-world applications and explores the rise of MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) and its importance for solving challenges such as model deployment and performance monitoring. By reviewing the evolution of MLOps and its relationship to traditional software development methods, the paper proposes ways to integrate the system into machine learning to solve the problems faced by existing MLOps and improve productivity. This paper focuses on the importance of automated model training, and the method to ensure the transparency and repeatability of the training process through version control system. In addition, the challenges of integrating machine learning components into traditional CI/CD pipelines are discussed, and solutions such as versioning environments and containerization are proposed. Finally, the paper emphasizes the importance of continuous monitoring and feedback loops after model deployment to maintain model performance and reliability. Using case studies and best practices from Netflix, the article presents key strategies and lessons learned for successful implementation of MLOps practices, providing valuable references for other organizations to build and optimize their own MLOps practices.
Densely Distilling Cumulative Knowledge for Continual Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Continual learning, involving sequential training on diverse tasks, often faces catastrophic forgetting. While knowledge distillation-based approaches exhibit notable success in preventing forgetting, we pinpoint a limitation in their ability to distill the cumulative knowledge of all the previous tasks. To remedy this, we propose Dense Knowledge Distillation (DKD). DKD uses a task pool to track the model's capabilities. It partitions the output logits of the model into dense groups, each corresponding to a task in the task pool. It then distills all tasks' knowledge using all groups. However, using all the groups can be computationally expensive, we also suggest random group selection in each optimization step. Moreover, we propose an adaptive weighting scheme, which balances the learning of new classes and the retention of old classes, based on the count and similarity of the classes. Our DKD outperforms recent state-of-the-art baselines across diverse benchmarks and scenarios. Empirical analysis underscores DKD's ability to enhance model stability, promote flatter minima for improved generalization, and remains robust across various memory budgets and task orders. Moreover, it seamlessly integrates with other CL methods to boost performance and proves versatile in offline scenarios like model compression.
Risk-Sensitive Online Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We study the design of risk-sensitive online algorithms, in which risk measures are used in the competitive analysis of randomized online algorithms. We introduce the CVaR$_δ$-competitive ratio ($δ$-CR) using the conditional value-at-risk of an algorithm's cost, which measures the expectation of the $(1-δ)$-fraction of worst outcomes against the offline optimal cost, and use this measure to study three online optimization problems: continuous-time ski rental, discrete-time ski rental, and one-max search. The structure of the optimal $δ$-CR and algorithm varies significantly between problems: we prove that the optimal $δ$-CR for continuous-time ski rental is $2-2^{-Θ(\frac{1}{1-δ})}$, obtained by an algorithm described by a delay differential equation. In contrast, in discrete-time ski rental with buying cost $B$, there is an abrupt phase transition at $δ= 1 - Θ(\frac{1}{\log B})$, after which the classic deterministic strategy is optimal. Similarly, one-max search exhibits a phase transition at $δ= \frac{1}{2}$, after which the classic deterministic strategy is optimal; we also obtain an algorithm that is asymptotically optimal as $δ\downarrow 0$ that arises as the solution to a delay differential equation.